Smith: Robo callers make life miserable

John Kelly of the Washington Post wrote a column recently on robo calls. It started off this way: "If the telephone had been around in 14th-century Florence, Dante would have invented a special place in hell for telephone scammers: up to their necks in a lake of excrement, say, or an eternity spent having their toenails removed by pliers-wielding demons."

I can deeply relate to Kelly's desire. Each time we receive an unsolicited call I am tempted to quit my job and go to work on an invention that would allow people receiving robocalls to initiate a heart-stopping shock on the person making the call. If that isn't possible, maybe I could figure out how to permanently damage the business itself by blowing out their phone lines.

That would probably disrupt local politicians this time of year. Congressman John Garamendi, for example, called not once, not twice, but three times to "personally" remind our family to phone in for a "town hall" meeting.

When we didn't pick up the second time, Garamendi's automated voice said something to the effect of "I'm sorry I couldn't reach you but ..."

The third time another reminder.

Garamendi must have a lot of time on his hands if he can sit down and record voice-mail messages.

Too bad we can't cast votes at the same frequency that politicians call us at home.

The point is that I'm not a very violent person, but robo calls make me that way. Certainly, I get frustrated.

If I try to take a nap at noon, the phone rings. If I'm closing up the home at night around 9 o'clock, the phone rings.

And I've tried many a way to deter these calls.

If I see an unrecognizable number come up on the phone I answer and say: "Yes." Then there's the double click as something hangs up.

If I detect a pause in the connection, which is probably being rerouted to Nepal by way of Singapore, I say "You have two seconds" and then hang up.

Of course, there's always the easy approach for when someone calls for my wife or daughter: "I'm sorry they're not here, they've died and gone to heaven." It usually works, but only once.

We've put our phone on the do-not-call list several times to little effect (and I thought Garamendi voted for that legislation?).

And just recently I turned down the ringers on all the phones in the house except for one, on the belief that if the rings are less annoying we won't answer.

We also play a "numbers game" at home. When watching TV and the phone rings, the telephone number will come up on the TV screen. Usually, the caller is identified, but sometimes not. Then we sit around and ask ourselves if this is a call we should take. Usually, we let the call go to voice mail and usually the caller hangs up.

Personally, however, I prefer a solution offered by Mitch Diamond of Unison, Va., who was also quoted by Kelly. "I assume that the NSA could sort this out and locate all the perpetrators in one afternoon," he wrote. "Let's put them on it."

Well, Kelly responded, if Congress or the courts shut down the domestic spying program, maybe the NSA will have some time on its hands. I might even trade a few years' worth of my telephone records for the occasional drone-launched Hellfire missile aimed at a robo-call scammer, he said.

Hey, that's an idea I should share with Garamendi on the next town hall telephone meeting.